Monday, March 16, 2015

Denier weird from the Global Warming Policy Foundation and WUWT

I've been otherwise occupied the last couple of days and have missed a few items from denier land. I will make up - but not just yet.

In the meantime, here's a taster from WUWT.

Anthony Watts has an article (archived here) about how a bedraggled bunch of deniers has written a booklet for the denialist lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I didn't have to read any further than the first couple of sentences on page one to see that they are behaving like nutters. For example - the first chapter starts with the following quote from some Royal Society publication:

Royal Society: Yes. Earth’s average surface air temperature has increased by about 0.8◦C (1.4◦F) since 1900, with much of this increase taking place since the mid-1970s. A wide range of other observations such as sea-level rise, reduced Arctic sea ice extent and increased ocean heat content provide incontrovertible evidence of a warming Earth.

Underneath that quote, the GWPF's first sentence in the first chapter - on global warming and surface temperature:

A fuller picture: This is hardly an important question. The Earth’s surface is always warming or cooling, or on some occasions barely changing.

Profound, not! So global warming isn't an important question. Right. WUWT and the Global Warming Policy Foundation can shut up shop.

Anthony or whoever penned the blurb from the GWPF wrote:

The paper was written and endorsed by the following experts:

Prof Robert Carter

Prof Vincent Courtillot

Prof Freeman Dyson

Prof Christopher Essex

Dr Indur Goklany

Prof Will Happer

Prof Richard Lindzen

Prof Ross McKitrick

Prof Ian Plimer

Dr Matt Ridley

Sir Alan Rudge

Prof Nir Shaviv

Prof Fritz Vahrenholt

The only thing this ragtag mob have any "expertise" in is in spouting various denialist memes. I bet that most of them wrote not a word of the booklet. They probably just lent their names to it, and as probably, sight unseen.

16 comments:

Every year my accountant provides me with incontrovertible evidence that my bank accounts are decreasing. Whereupon, I provide him with the fuller picture. He gets this strange look when he's informed that decreasing bank accounts are hardly important. After all, my bank accounts are always increasing and decreasing, or on some occasions hardly changing at all. I didn't know it but, according to my accountant, it's called the Ridley Principle aka the Northern Rock Postulate. He's now taken to calling me an irRational Optimist, whatever that means.

We assumed ad argumentum that all warming since 1850 was anthropogenic, ran our model and found that the variance between its predicted warming to 2014 and the observed outturn was nil, implying – as explicitly stated in the paper, that there is no committed but unrealized global warming in the pipeline. See table 4 of our paper.

Table 4 sets the transience fraction, rₜ, to 0.6. The math here is trivial, but his ability to mangle the Queen's English is not.

Dyson has formed an opinion about AGW but it's inconceivable that this giant's view was informed by science. It's probably some peccadillo that ageing sometimes brings . Maybe he just hated James Hanson's beard. Who didn't?

This observer is of the opinion that certain classes of physicists have the same problem with climate that such an outsized proportion of engineers do -- it cannot be studied in the way they're accustomed, which translates to how it's being studied is flawed.

Could be, but these days whenever I'm near campus I'm usually too distracted by what the fairer gendered kids aren't wearing to even think about what their major might be. I'd miss a pocket protector or a slide rule even if those were still standard equipment ... as if there would be place to hang one. Yes, I'm going to hell.

Na, it's kind of a loud, confident, hungover, right wing and wrong kind of demeanour.

"Hungover" carries the implication that the subject has stopped drinking for some minimal period of time, long enough for the intoxication to start wearing off. That is not my experience with engineering students in Oz.

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All you need to know about WUWT

WUWT insider Willis Eschenbach tells you all you need to know about Anthony Watts and his blog, WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). As part of his scathing commentary, Wondering Willis accuses Anthony Watts of being clueless about the blog articles he posts. To paraphrase:

Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece...(he couldn't tell if it would)... stand the harsh light of public exposure.

Definition of Denier (Oxford): A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.
‘a prominent denier of global warming’
‘a climate change denier’

Alternative definition: A former French coin, equal to one twelfth of a Sou, which was withdrawn in the 19th century. Oxford. (The denier has since resurfaced with reduced value.)